DIGITAL BOOKMOBILE FOCUSES ON COPYRIGHT.(Technology)(Column)

Byline: JAN DEMPSEY STAFF RESEARCHER

Some residents of Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Ohio, and Washington, D.C., were treated to an unusual sight this month. They might have seen a bookmobile - a van, really - traveling down the highway with a message painted on the side: "1,000,000 books inside (soon)."

This is not a typical bookmobile. This was a digital bookmobile traveling from California to Washington, where one could have one of almost 20,000 books currently available for free on the Internet downloaded, printed and bound into book form.

This bookmobile is the creation of Brewster Kahle, director of the Internet Archive, in an attempt to focus on the issue of public domain. Public domain allows works that are no longer protected by copyright to be copied or used by the public in any manner.

The bookmobile arrived in Washington just in time to park outside the Supreme Court Oct. 9 when arguments began in the case of Eldred v. Ashcroft. This case, which addresses the extension of copyright, will ultimately determine how many books will be available in the public domain.

Kahle's vision is for a country where anyone, young or old, can have access to a printed copy of a book in the public domain. But this won't happen if the current Copyright Term Extension Act is not overturned.

The current copyright act gives owners of their works copyright protection for their lifetime plus 70 years, while the Constitution originally gave Congress power to grant protection for only 14 years.

If copyright protection continues to be expanded, as it has been 11 times in the last 40 years, the public domain might cease to exist. As it is now, no new works will enter the public domain until 2019 due to the Copyright Term Extension Act passed in 1998.

Today we have the technology to easily download, print and bind books from the Internet. Think of the impact this could have on school, public and special libraries with limited budgets. Think of all the rare and out-of-print books and documents that can be digitized and made available to everyone at minimal cost.

This won't replace libraries but will allow all libraries to expand their reach.

Stay tuned. The ruling in the Eldred v. Ashcroft case is expected in the spring of 2003.

For more information on the copyright act go to http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act

For more on the Internet Bookmobile go to http://webdev.archive.org/texts/bookmobile.php

Send your search questions to Jan Dempsey via e-mail at technology@syracuse.com, fax at 470-2141 or standard mail at Technology, Box 4915, Syracuse, N.Y. 13221.